A Chat is a conversation with Compound’s AI agent inside a Drive. You ask questions in natural language, attach files for context, and the agent can read, edit, and create files on your behalf — Excel workbooks, Word documents, PowerPoint decks, and more. Every Chat keeps its own thread of messages, files, and agent edits.

Anatomy of a chat

A chat has three regions:

The message thread — your messages and the agent’s responses, including streamed plans, citations, and a record of every edit the agent made.
The composer — where you type. The composer holds the message text, any attached files, the Public data toggles, and the effort selector.
File cards — when the agent creates or edits a file, a card for it appears in the chat. Canvas View opens automatically when the agent starts working; click a card later to reopen the file or switch between files.

Attaching files and selecting cells

Drag files onto the composer, paste them, or click the upload icon to add Excel, Word, PowerPoint, PDF, CSV, image, audio, or video files. Attached files become context the agent can read for the next message.

When working in a workbook, you can highlight a range of cells to focus the next instruction on. A selection chip appears in the composer; click Add to message to include it, or dismiss the chip to clear it.

Public data sources

Under Public data in the composer, toggle on any of the built-in sources you want the agent to draw from:

SEC Filings — 10-K, 10-Q, 8-K, proxy statements, and other filings from EDGAR.
Web — live web search.
Earnings Transcripts — earnings call transcripts.
Polymarket — prediction market data.
Stocks — price and fundamentals.

Toggles are remembered per chat, so a chat scoped to a single ticker can keep SEC Filings and Earnings Transcripts on by default.

Standard vs Deep effort

The composer has an effort selector with two options:

Standard — faster responses at lower cost. The default.
Deep — more thorough reasoning, uses more credits. Use this for harder analytical work or when Standard is producing shallow answers.

Reviewing agent edits

When the agent edits a file, Canvas View opens alongside the chat so you can watch changes happen in real time. If you’ve closed Canvas (or need to switch to another file), click the file card in the chat to reopen it.

From Canvas View, use Versions to see and restore any earlier state of the file. For Excel workbooks specifically, Review enters a diff mode that compares two versions — the initial display is an overlay highlighting what changed, and a Split View toggle in the toolbar flips to side-by-side. Exit review returns you to the latest version. Review is currently available for workbooks only — Word documents and PowerPoint decks have versioning, but no diff yet.

The agent’s edits are not destructive — every edit creates a new version you can revert to from the Versions menu.

Sharing a chat

Click Share at the top of the chat to open the Share Chat dialog, then choose:

Restricted Access — only the people you explicitly add can view.
Anyone with the link — anyone with the URL can view the chat read-only.
Anyone in your enterprise with the link — limited to members of your team (shown only when you’re on a team).

Use Copy link to grab the URL; use Stop sharing to revoke public access. Anyone visiting a public snapshot sees the chat exactly as it was at the moment they loaded the page — including any files in their current version — without needing a Compound account.

Note

Snapshot links share a single Chat, not a whole Drive. To share an entire Drive with a collaborator, use Drive sharing (see Drives and files).

What the agent can and can’t do

The agent can:

Read every attached file and any toggled-on public source.
Edit Excel workbooks, Word documents, and PowerPoint decks.
Read PDFs and quote them with page-level citations.
Run analyses across multiple files in the same chat.
Cite the source of every claim, with page-level citations for PDFs.

The agent can’t:

Reach into files outside the chat’s context unless you attach them or toggle on a public source.
Edit PDFs in place — PDFs are read-only in Canvas View. The agent can quote them and extract data into a workbook, but to change the PDF itself you’d export to a different format first.
Take actions outside Compound (send email, post elsewhere, etc.). You can reach the agent inbound by email (see Email), but the agent doesn’t send outbound messages on its own.

Chats and the AI agent